MSI GTX 670 Power Edition: When Reference is Not Reference

Results: LuxMark

And now for something completely different. This benchmark shows off the GPGPU capabilities of these cards by rendering a ray traced scene using GPU power only. I used the Medium Benchmark–Sala–for stressing out these GPUs. Remember, NVIDIA stripped out some of the GPGPU power in the latest GTX 600 series so they can focus more on gaming and power consumption.

What an interesting change from the GTX 580 vs. the HD 6970. Those last generation parts had the GTX 580 well above that of the HD 6970 in GPGPU type applications. Now NVIDIA has fallen off the face of the earth in comparison to AMD’s GCN architecture. If GPGPU is a major part of a user’s diet, then the current GTX 600 cards will not be optimal for such applications.

I was wondering how much of a performance gain is seen versus a reference GTX670. Unfortunately, this is not included in the graphs of the game testing. Too bad..

I don't understand the last part of the article, where you mention that MSI's default overclock, is actually causing crashes when put into benchmark / torture test. This would mean MSI's overclock is unstable?

You are looking at most at about a 4% increase over a stock clocked GTX 670. The differences are not all that great. You are primarily getting this card for the cooling and unique design/voltage control rather than it being a much, much faster product than the stock GTX 670.

The last part actually reads, "At no time was this card unstable during benchmarking and torture tests..." So basically it was perfectly stable even with the boost speed up to 1170+ right out of the box. The card performed without issue.

Hey Josh, I wanted to say thanks for the article. I have been on the fence about upgrading from my old xfx radeon 5870. I had been hunting the various 670/680 cards and the amd 7970 and so forth. After all is said and done I got this card yesterday for $395 with borderlands 2 and mafia 2. I have overclocked it an have the core at 1170 mhz and my boost has been anywhere from 1250-1350mhz. This is of course with a voltage bump and such. Anyway, thank you again for a quality article that has resulted in a massive performance bump for me. Temperatures are still low even under load and even at 50% fan the card is still nice and quiet. :D

Josh, I was comparing the BF3 at 2560x1600 Ultra results in your article to those from the Galaxy GTX 670 GC 4GB article. Your results for the MSI GTX 670 PE card are 48fps min and 63.8fps avg. The results for the Galaxy card at the same settings are 26fps min, 41fps avg and 66fps max.

Can the BF3 results for the MSI and Galaxy cards from the two articles be compared? If so, why pay more for the extra 2GB of memory on Galaxy card? Any chance the results for the MSI card are avg and max?